The latest sacrilege against the Hagia Sophia was conveyed by photographs this week showing heavy vehicles inside the greatest all basilicas of eastern Christendom, with the sight generating heated reactions in Turkey and abroad.

In response, Turkey’s culture ministry said the presence of a crane truck inside the 6th century structure was due to “works as part of restoring the monument” and for “quake protection”.

The Hagia Sophia (God’s Wisdom) in the old quarter of Istanbul was converted into a mosque after the Bosporus metropolis’ conquest by the Ottomans in 1453, when the imperial city was Constantinople, only to be transformed into a museum in the 1930s and then again into a Muslim mosque by the Erdogan government in 2020.